| DotNetKicks.com Links |
| Dynamic Data - Custom Metadata Providers ... This is really just an addition to Matt Berseth's article Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers from August 24, 2008, all I wanted to do was add the same features to the Table/Class not just the Columns/Properties. So you can see the full explanation over at Matt Berseth's blog. So here are the listings: | Go |
| Scott Hanselman: ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite Module ... "Last year I noticed that there were 11 ways to get to my blog. Literally 11 different URLs and it wasn't helping me my ranking in the search engines. I wrote about this in detail and how I used ISAPI_Rewrite to fix it up.
Fast forward to this year and the IIS7 team has been taking advantage of IIS7's modular design to release a bunch of new modules out-of-band." | Go |
| Microsoft Gold Partner Program as a General Selling Point is a Complet ... I don't know how many shops I've seen, interviewed with, or even worked at that wave the "We're a Microsoft Gold Partner" geek flag waved around as if without knowing the place, we automatically are supposed to assume the shop is a credible development shop. Most of these are waved by non-technical managers that know nothing about quality code. This means nothing to me in terms of credibility & quality, and it's clearly just a marketing term that only benefits Microsoft and somehow makes employers think they should be proud that they are a Gold Partner. It's like giving an office worker a Certificate because they passed the HTML For Dummies course to hang on their cubes at work. | Go |
| Fast Download and Install of Microsoft's Web Stack ... Introducing Microsoft's Web Platform Installer: a one stop shop for downloading and installing the Microsoft Web Stack including IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Visual Web Developer, all of the current IIS Extensions and more! Once installed, this tool automatically discovers new additions and updates to the platform, keeping you up to date. | Go |
| Creating a reusable GridTreeView with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery, take two ... An HtmlHelper extension method that renders a collapsible gridview (which I now call a GridTreeView) using the MVCContrib Grid HtmlHelper extension and the jQuery ActsAsTreeTable plug-in. | Go |
| Using jQuery to do Ajax Form posts in Asp.net MVC ... It is now official with Scott Guthrie's post that jQuery will be bundled with Asp.net. jQuery is a tiny 15K JavaScript library that contains features from UI tweaks, DOM manipulation to full Ajax control. In my last post, I have shown how to get going with Ajax.Form using Microsoft MVC Ajax library. In this post, I will show how to do Ajax form posts with jQuery but in Ajax.Form style. | Go |
| MVC Tutorials ... I created three new ASP.NET MVC tutorials that were just published at the www.ASP.net/mvc website. There are both C# and VB.NET versions of each tutorial. Here are the direct links and descriptions: Creating Custom HTML Helpers Create new HTML Helpers... | Go |
| Dynamically Add Text to Images Retrieved from the Database ... We often create applications where we retrieve images from the database and display it on the page. At times, we may need to add some text or a copyright notice dynamically on the images. This article discusses how to do so using an ASP.NET Http Handler. more... | Go |
| Response.Redirect and Output Caching Trouble ... Be careful when conditionally redirecting pages when using output caching. This post describes a potential issue you could run into, and provides some analysis and workarounds. | Go |
| CRUD operations using the List View Web Server Control ... Using the ASP.NET ListView Control we can insert,edit, or delete records without writing any code. This post explains how to display and update data using the ListView control. We will use SqlDataSource control to retrieve results from the data source and act as the data source for the ListView control. | Go |
| Missing ASP.Net tab in IIS ... Steps to fix missing ASP.Net tab in IIS | Go |
| Using jQuery to display a modal UpdatePanel confirmation ... Another hit on using jQuery with ASP.NET AJAX by Dave Ward | Go |
| Using jQuery to display a modal UpdatePanel confirmation ... An example of using jQuery's BlockUI plugin to display the result of an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel's partial postback as a modal confirmation dialog. | Go |
| Using jQuery to display a modal UpdatePanel confirmation ... An example of using jQuery's BlockUI plugin to display the result of an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel's partial postback as a modal confirmation dialog. | Go |
| Delicious tagged ASP.NET Links |
| Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0 - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| CodeProject: Exploring Caching in ASP.NET. Free source code and programming help | Go |
| ASP.NET website Continuous Integration+Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication | Go |
| An Introduction to jQuery - Part 1: The Client Side | Go |
| http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ASPNETMVCAndTheNewIIS7RewriteModule.aspx | Go |
| IIS 6 Compression - quickest and effective way to do it for ASP.NET compression - Omar AL Zabir blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 | Go |
| Microsoft Web Platform | Go |
| Scott Gu Blog Links |
| October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Best Practices for Creating ASP.NET websites with IIS 6.0 : Omar Al Zabir, author of the excellent Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book , has a great article that details best practices to follow when setting up a site on IIS 6.0. Definitely worth reading and book-marking. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos using VB: Bill Burrows has put together an awesome series of videos that show off how to use the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data support provided in .NET 3.5 SP1. You can find more links to ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorials in my last link post here . Exploring Caching in ASP.NET : Abhijit Jana has a nice article that discusses caching options with ASP.NET. If you are interested in another nice (but not well known) caching technique, you might also want to check out my prior Tip/Trick post on "Donut Caching" using the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution feature . Routing with WebForms : Wally McClure has a nice podcast that describes how to use the new ASP.NET routing infrastructure in .NET 3.5 SP1 with Web Forms based pages. A lot of people mistakenly think this feature only works with ASP.NET MVC applications - when in reality it also works with web forms pages (in fact all ASP.NET Dynamic Data sites use it). ASP.NET Continuous Integration and Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy : Omar Al Zabir has another great article - this time on implementing continuous integration with ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery An Introduction to jQuery (Part 1) : Rick Strahl has posted an excellent article that introduces jQuery, and walks-through how to take advantage of it within ASP.NET pages. New AJAX Support for Data-Driven Web Apps : Bertrand Le Roy has written a great MSDN article that describes some of the new ASP.NET AJAX features available in preview form today. Also check out his blog posts here and here to learn more about how the new client-side data templating feature support. Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication : Dave Ward has a cool article that describes how to integrate jQuery functionality with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel control to enable better progress indication status. ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET AJAX and discusses how to add history points to an AJAX-enabled web page so that visitors can bookmark it, as well as to enable back/forward browser navigation. This is a new feature added to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1. 46 ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials : Christian Wenz has published 46 super useful tutorials in both VB and C# that show of how to perform common scenarios with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Microsoft Web Platform Web Platform Installer: Make it easy to setup for web development : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that shows off the new "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" we are building that provides an easy way to quickly install every Microsoft web component out there - and quickly get a machine ready for web development. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Amazon EC2 Support for Windows and ASP.NET: Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud. Using ASP.NET WebForms, MVC and Dynamic Data in a Single Application : Scott Hanselman has a nice post that demonstrates how you can have a single ASP.NET application that uses ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, WebServices and Dynamic Data. You have the flexibility to mix and match them however you want, which allows you to always use the right tool depending on the specific job. Modifying Data with the ListView's EditItemTemplate : Matt Berseth has a great post that talks about how to use the ASP.NET 3.5 ListView control to enable in-place editing scenarios - with total html markup control. 4 New Grouping Grid Skins: Vista, Bold, Win2k3 and Soft : Matt Berseth has another nice post that demonstrates how to skin the ASP.NET ListView control to enable some sweet data grouping scenarios. Unlocking and Approving User Accounts : Scott Mitchell posts another in his great series of articles on ASP.NET security (click here for all the articles in the series). This article talks about how you can setup administration pages that allow admins to lock out and approve user accounts using the ASP.NET Membership system. Adding OpenID to you website in conjunction to ASP.NET Membership : Dan Hounshell has a nice article that discusses how to add OpenID authentication support to your web-site, and use it in conjunction to ASP.NET's built-in membership system. ASP.NET MVC MVC Membership with Preview 5 : Troy Goode posts an update of his popular MVC Membership template that works with ASP.NET MVC Preview 5. It provides a set of administration pages you can use for user/role management, as well as adds support for OpenID and Windows LiveID. MVC Flickr Xplorer : Mehfuz Hossain has a cool ASP.NET MVC sample application posted that enables a nice picture explorer for FlickR photos. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Simple 5 Table Northwind Example : Matt Berseth kicks off his ASP.NET Dynamic Data tutorial series with a nice post that shows how to build a simple 5 table application using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with .NET 3.5 SP1. Dynamic Data And Custom Metadata Providers : Matt continues the series and covers the MetadataType attribute, and how you can use it to annotate your entities with additional metadata. Dynamic Menu for your Dynamic Data: Matt continues and covers how to add a data-driven menu to the site. Customizing the Delete Confirmation Dialog : Matt continues and demonstrates how to build a nice UI experience when deleting records in a dynamic data application. Experimenting with YUI's DataTable and DataSource Controls : Matt experiments with how to use client-side AJAX components together with dynamic data. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| jQuery and Microsoft ... jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes. For example, the below JavaScript uses jQuery to find all <div> elements within a page that have a CSS class of "product", and then animate them to slowly disappear: As another example, the JavaScript below uses jQuery to find a specific <table> on the page with an id of "datagrid1", then retrieves every other <tr> row within the datagrid, and sets those <tr> elements to have a CSS class of "even" - which could be used to alternate the background color of each row: [Note: both of these samples were adapted from code snippets in the excellent jQuery in Action book] Providing the ability to perform selection and animation operations like above is something that a lot of developers have asked us to add to ASP.NET AJAX, and this support was something we listed as a proposed feature in the ASP.NET AJAX Roadmap we published a few months ago. As the team started to investigate building it, though, they quickly realized that the jQuery support for these scenarios is already excellent, and that there is a huge ecosystem and community built up around it already. The jQuery library also works well on the same page with ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Rather than duplicate functionality, we thought, wouldn't it be great to just use jQuery as-is, and add it as a standard, supported, library in VS/ASP.NET, and then focus our energy building new features that took advantage of it? We sent mail the jQuery team to gauge their interest in this, and quickly heard back that they thought that it sounded like an interesting idea too. Supporting jQuery I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. For example: and with a chained command: The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1). The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS. Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support ) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well. We also plan to contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches back to the jQuery open source project. These will all go through the standard jQuery patch review process. Summary We are really excited to be able to partner w | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available ... This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2. There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today's build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they'll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven't found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums). Important: We are releasing only the Silverlight Developer Runtime edition (as well as the VS and Blend tools to support it) today, and are not releasing the regular end-user edition of Silverlight. This is because we want to give existing developers a short amount of time to update their applications to work with the final Silverlight 2 APIs before sites are allowed to go live with it. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC, and we want to make sure that existing sites can update to the final release quickly once the final release is out. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now - you can't go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though). You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here . Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1. You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support. If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here . Beta2->RC API Updates Today's release candidate includes a ton of bug fix and some significant performance optimization work. Today's release candidate also includes a number of final API tweaks designed to fix differences between Silverlight and the full .NET Framework. Most of these changes are relatively small (order of parameters, renames of methods/properties, movement of types across namespaces, etc) although there are a number of them. You can read this blog post and download this document to get a listing of the known API breaking changes made from the Beta2 release. We have updated the styles of the controls shipped with Silverlight, and have also modified some of the state groups and control template names they use. When upgrading from Beta2 you might find it useful to temporarily remove any custom style templates you've defined, and get your application functionality working using the RC first - and then after that works add back in the styles one style definition at a time to catch any rename/behavior change issues with them. If you find yourself stuck with an question/issue moving from Beta2 to the RC, please report it on the www.silverlight.net forums (Silverlight team members will be on there helping folks). If after a day or two you aren't getting an answer please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com ) and I can help or connect you with someone who knows the answer. New Controls Today's release candidate includes a bunch of feature additions and tweaks across Silverlight 2, as well as in the VS and Blend tools targeting it. In general you'll find a number of nice improvements across the controls, networking, data caching, layout, rendering, media stack, and other components and sub-systems. Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install): At runtime these controls by default look like: The ComboBox in Silverlight 2 supports standard DropDownList semantics. In addition to statically defining items like above, you | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios ... This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. You can download the new release here . This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently released .NET 3.5 SP1. It can also now be used with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as (the free) Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 edition (which now supports both class library and web application projects). Preview 5 includes a bunch of new features and refinements (these build on the additions in "Preview 4" ). You can read detailed "Preview 5" release notes that cover changes/additions here . In this blog post I'm going to cover one of the biggest areas of focus with this release: form posting scenarios. You can download a completed version of the application I'll build below here . Basic Form Post with a Web MVC Pattern Let's look at a simple form post scenario - adding a new product to a products database: The page above is returned when a user navigates to the "/Products/Create" URL in our application. The HTML form markup for this page looks like below: The markup above is standard HTML. We have two <input type="text"/> textboxes within a <form> element. We then have an HTML submit button at the bottom of the form. When pressed it will cause the form it is nested within to post the form inputs to the server. The form will post the contents to the URL indicated by its "action" attribute - in this case "/Products/Save". Using the previous "Preview 4" release of ASP.NET we might have implemented the above scenario using a ProductsController class like below that implements two action methods - "Create" and "Save": The "Create" action method above is responsible for returning an html view that displays our initial empty form. The "Save" action method then handles the scenario when the form is posted back to the server. The ASP.NET MVC framework automatically maps the "ProductName" and "UnitPrice" form post values to the method parameters on the Save method with the same names. The Save action then uses LINQ to SQL to create a new Product object, assigns its ProductName and UnitPrice values with the values posted by the end-user, and then attempts to save the new product in the database. If the product is successfully saved, the user is redirected to a "/ProductsAdded" URL that will display a success message. If there is an error we redisplay our "Create" html view again so that the user can fix the issue and retry. We could then implement a "Create" HTML view template like below that would work with the above ProductsController to generate the appropriate HTML. Note below that we are using the Html.TextBox helper methods to generate the <input type="text"/> elements for us (and automatically populate their value from the appropriate property in our Product model object that we passed to the view): Form Post Improvements with Preview 5 The above code works with the previous "Preview 4" release, and continues to work fine with "Preview 5". The "Preview 5" release, though, adds several additional features that will allow us to make this scenario even better. These new features include: The ability to publish a single action URL and dispatch it differently depending on the HTTP Verb Model Binders that allow rich parameter objects to be constructed from form input values and passed to action methods Helper methods that enable incoming form input values to be mapped to existing model object instances within action methods Improved support for handling input and validation errors (for example: automatically highlighting bad fields and preserving end-user entered form values when the form is redisplayed to the user) I'll use the remainder of this blog post to drill into each of these scenarios. [AcceptVerbs] and [ActionName] attributes In our sample above we implemented ou | Go |
| Quick Update ... I've received a number of (very nice) emails recently asking if I was ok - since my blog has been silent the last few weeks (and much of the summer). Just to address people's concerns - I'm alive and well. :-) I've just been on vacation the last 6 weeks, and have unfortunately not had free time to post (I've been changing a lot of diapers). I am still on vacation another week before I officially return to work. I did get a chance to write up a quick post this weekend that covers some of the new ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 features, though, that will hopefully provide some interim reading until I can resume a more regular posting schedule over the next month when I get back into the office. Thanks, Scott P.S. Somewhat to my embarrassment I started a Part1/Part2 post on "Preview 4" right before I left for vacation, and didn't have time to finish part 2 before "Preview 5" came out. I am going to post this lost segment (which covered AJAX) later this month and write it against the latest preview build. P.P.S. People often ask me whether I write my own blog. Yep - I actually really do write every single post. Hopefully my absence the last 6 weeks provides some evidence to support this. :-) | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) ... The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you t | Go |
| Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released ... Silverlight 2 Beta2 was released today. You can download both Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools support to target it here . Beta2 adds a lot of new features (more details below), but is still a 4.6 MB download that takes less than 10 seconds to install on a machine. It does not require the .NET Framework or any other software to be installed for it to work, and all features work cross-browser on both Mac and Windows machines. These features will also be supported on Linux via the Moonlight 2 release. Silverlight 2 Beta2 supports a go-live license that allows you to start using and deploying Silverlight 2 for commercial applications. There will be some API changes between Beta2 and the final release, so you should expect that applications you write with Beta2 will need to make some updates when the final release comes out. But we think that these changes will be straight-forward and relatively easy, and that you can begin planning and starting commercial projects now. You can build Silverlight Beta2 applications using the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview downloads. You can download both of them here . The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download works with both VS 2008 and the recent VS 2008 SP1 beta release. UI and Control Improvements Silverlight 2 Beta2 includes a bunch of work in the UI and Control space: More Built-in Controls In Beta 1 only a few controls were included with the core Silverlight setup. Most common controls (including Button, ListBox, Slider, etc) were shipped within separate assemblies that you had to bundle with your applications (which increased the app download size). Beta 2 now installs 30+ of the most common controls as part of the core Silverlight 2 download. This means that you can now build Silverlight 2 applications that use core controls that are as small as 3kb in size - making Silverlight application downloads small and startup time fast. In addition to the core controls included with the base Silverlight 2 setup, we are also this week shipping additional higher-level controls that are implemented in separate assemblies that you can then reference and include with your applications. This includes controls like DataGrid (more details on its new Beta2 features below), Calendar (now with multi-day selection and blackout date support in Beta2), and a TabPanel control (new in Beta2). We ultimately expect to ship over a 100 controls for Silverlight. Control Template Editing Support One of the most powerful features of the WPF and Silverlight programming model is the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls. This allows developers and designers to sculpt the UI of controls in both subtle and dramatic ways, and enables a tremendous amount of flexibility. I covered these concepts a little in my previous Silverlight Control Templating blog post here . This week's Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview now adds designer support for editing control templates - which makes it easy for you to quickly change the look of any control without having to drop-down to XAML source to-do it. To see control template editing in action, just drag/drop two Slider controls onto the Expression Blend design surface: We might decide that the slider head in the default Slider control template is too large and wide for our application. To use control template editing to change it, we can right-click on one of the sliders in the designer and select the "Edit Control Parts" context menu item. We can choose to create a new empty control template for our slider (and start from scratch), or alternatively edit a copy of the built-in control template (and start from that and tweak it): After we choose to edit a copy of the existing control template, Blend will prompt us to create and name a re-usable style resource that we'll define our control template wit | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Support with Visual Web Developer 2008 Express ... Last week I blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 release . One important thing I forgot to mention about this release is that you can now use it with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition. The SP1 release of Visual Web Developer 2008 Express adds support for both class library projects as well as web application projects (previously only web site projects could be used with it). This new support is useful in itself, as well as in enabling both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight project support with VWD Express. If you install the Visual Web Developer Express SP1 Beta you can start using ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 with it immediately. Important: ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 does not require SP1 to be installed if you are using Visual Studio 2008. ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 will work with both VS 2008 and VS 2008 SP1 just fine. You can learn more about the new VWD Express support for ASP.NET MVC from the VS Web Tools team blog here . This post also includes a free web download that provides ASP.NET MVC Test project support for NUnit-based unit tests. You can use these NUnit project templates with both Visual Studio 2008 as well as with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. Hope this helps, Scott | Go |
| ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release ... This morning we released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. I blogged details last month about an interim source release we did that included many of the changes with this Preview 3 release. Today's build includes some additional features not in last month's drop, some nice enhancements/refinements, as well as Visual Studio tool integration and documentation. You can download an integrated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 setup package here . You can also optionally download the ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 framework source code and framework unit tests here . Controller Action Method Changes ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 includes the MVC Controller changes we first discussed and previewed with the April MVC source release , along with some additional tweaks and adjustments. You can continue to write controller action methods that return void and encapsulate all of their logic within the action method. For example: which would render the below HTML when run: Preview 3 also now supports using an approach where you return an "ActionResult" object that indicates the result of the action method, and enables deferred execution of it. This allows much easier unit testing of actions (without requiring the need to mock anything). It also enables much cleaner composition and overall execution control flow. For example, we could use LINQ to SQL within our Browse action method to retrieve a sequence of Product objects from our database and indicate that we want to render a View of them. The code below will cause three pieces of "ViewData" to be passed to the view - "Title" and "CategoryName" string values, and a strongly typed sequence of products (passed as the ViewData.Model object): One advantage of using the above ActionResult approach is that it makes unit testing Controller actions really easy (no mocking required). Below is a unit test that verifies the behavior of our Browse action method above: We can then author a "Browse" ViewPage within the \Views\Products sub-directory to render a response using the ViewData populated by our Browse action: When we hit the /Products/Browse/Beverages URL we'll then get an HTML response like below (with the three usages of ViewData circled in red): Note that in addition to support a "ViewResult" response (for indicating that a View should be rendered), ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 also adds support for returning "JsonResult" (for AJAX JSON serialization scenarios), "ContentResult" (for streaming content without a View), as well as HttpRedirect and RedirectToAction/Route results. The overall ActionResult approach is extensible (allowing you to create your own result types), and overtime you'll see us add several more built-in result types. Improved HTML Helper Methods The HTML helper methods have been updated with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3. In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, they also include a number of nice usability improvements. Automatic Value Lookup With previous preview releases you needed to always explicitly pass in the value to render when calling the Html helpers. For example: to include a value within a <input type="text" value="some value"/> element you would write: The above code continues to work - although now you can also just write: The HTML helpers will now by default check both the ViewData dictionary and any Model object passed to the view for a ProductName key or property value to use. SelectList and MultiSelectList ViewModels New SelectList and MultiSelectList View-Model classes are now included that provide a cleaner way to populate HTML dropdowns and multi-select listboxes (and manage things like current selection, etc). One approach that can make form scenarios cleaner is to instantiate and setup these View-Model objects in a controller action, and then pass them in the ViewData dictionary to the View to format/render. For example, below I'm creating a SelectList view-model class over the | Go |
| May 20th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, .NET, Visual Studio, Silverlight, WPF ... Apologies for the sparseness of my posting the last few weeks - work and life have been busy here lately. Below is a new post in my link-listing series to help kick things up a little. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Bulk Inserting Data with the ListView Control : Matt Berseth continues his awesome posts with one that shows how to handle bulk-editing of data using the ASP.NET ListView control in .NET 3.5. Master-Detail with the GridView, DetailsView, and ModalPopup Controls : Another great post from Matt that describes how to cleanly handle a common data entry scenario. Creating Great Thumbnail Images in ASP.NET : A really nice blog post by a different Matt that details an approach that generates high quality (and small) thumbnail images. Warning the User when Caps-Lock is on : Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to automatically detect and warn users in login pages when the caps-lock button is on. ASP.NET Perf Issue: Large numbers of application-restarts due to virus scanners : Tess Ferrandez has a great post that details a debug session to determine why an ASP.NET application was restarting frequently (causing performance slowdowns). The issue was a virus scanner that was causing files to be constantly updated. Make sure to check out the logging code you can add to your application to identify restart causes like this. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar Control : Matt Berseth has another great article that describes his new ASP.NET AJAX Progress Bar control. Faster Page Loading By Combining Multiple JavaScript files in Batch : Omar Al Zabir (founder of PageFlakes.com and author of the great Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 book) has a good article that describes the performance benefit of merging multiple JavaScript file downloads. Note that .NET 3.5 SP1 will include a new script combiner feature that helps make doing this even easier. Create ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls using the ScriptControl base class : Chris Pietschmann has a nice article that talks about how to build new ASP.NET AJAX server controls by deriving from the built-in ScriptControl base class. Inline Edit Box and Postback Ritalin Beta : Dave Ward and Mike Davis have created a new CodePlex project for their popular Inline Edit Box and PostBack Ritalin ASP.NET AJAX controls. .NET 7 Ways to Simplify your code with LINQ : Igor Ostrovsky has a great blog post that talks about new code techniques you can use to improve your code using .NET 3.5 and the new language and LINQ features in it. Visual LINQ Query Builder for LINQ to SQL : Mitsu Furuta has created a cool Visual Studio designer that allows you to graphically construct LINQ to SQL queries. Also make sure to download download the latest LINQPad utility - which is invaluable for learning LINQ and trying out LINQ queries. DataContracts without Attributes (POCO support): Aaron Skonnard has a good post that talks about a nice usability change with .NET 3.5 SP1 that allows you to serialize POCO (plain old objects) using the WCF serializers. Ukadc.Diagnostics : Josh Twist pointed me at a new CodePlex project he is working on that extends the System.Diagnostics features in .NET to include richer logging features (SQL trace support, email support, etc). Visual Studio 11 More VS Short Cuts you Should Know : A great post that talks about a bunch of useful shortcuts to print out and remember when using Visual Studio. Did you know you can show extension methods in the object browser?: Sara Ford continues her excellent "Did you know" series. I confess I didn't know this one. Silverlight 50 New Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Screencasts: Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have put together 50 nice tutorial screen-casts that cover Silverlight 2 - all in their "spare time". Wow. AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes : Nikhil Kothari has a | Go |
| Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta ... Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).
We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates. You can download and install the beta here .
Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes
The SP1 beta released today is still in beta form - so you should be careful about installing it on critical machines. There are a few important SP1 Beta installation notes to be aware of:
1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.
2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.
3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.
Important Update : If you previously installed a VS 2008 Hotfix, you must run the HotFix Cleanup Utility before installing the VS 2008 SP1 Beta. Click here to download and run this.
Improvements for Web Development
.NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 contain a bunch of feature improvements targeted at web application development.
The VS Web Dev Tools team has more details (including specific bug fix details) on some of the VS specific work here . Below are more details on some of the work in the web-space:
ASP.NET Data Scaffolding Support (ASP.NET Dynamic Data)
.NET 3.5 SP1 adds support for a rich ASP.NET data "scaffolding" framework that enables you to quickly build functional data-driven web application. With the ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature you can automatically build web UI (with full CRUD - create, read, update, delete - support) against a variety of data object models (including LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, REST Services, and any other ORM or object model with a dynamic data provider).
SP1 adds this new functionality to the existing GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView controls in ASP.NET, and enables smart validation and flexible data templating options. It also delivers new smart filtering server controls, as well as adds support for automatically traversing primary-key/foreign-key relationships and displaying friendly foreign key names - all of which saves you from having to write a ton of code.
You can learn more more about this feature from Scott Hanselman's videos and tutorials here .
ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a flexible new URL routing engine that allows you to map incoming URLs to route handlers. It includes support for both parsing parameters from clean URLs (for example: /Products/Browse/Beverages), as well as supp | Go |
| Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time) ... One of the things I like to track are book sales on Amazon.com, which provides a useful data point to monitor what developers are interested in on any given day. I use the www.TitleZ.com site (which is built using ASP.NET) to track specific titles I want to watch - it then generates a report showing real-time Amazon sales ranking data, as well as 7 day, 30 day and 90 day sales ranking averages. This morning I pulled up my report and saw the usual books near the top of my list, and was about to navigate away when I noticed the eye-popping amazon ranking of the top book -"Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB " by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader. Its Amazon sales rank was a stunning #95 (of all books on Amazon), which meant it was outselling even Harry Potter (which is pretty much unheard of for any technology book). It turns out that Amazon is holding a special price promotion for a short time on a few books - and this was one that was selected. Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49. I'm not sure how long this promotion will last - but if you are looking for a great ASP.NET 3.5 book this might be something you might want to take advantage of: The book is a great ASP.NET 3.5 book and an excellent end to end resource. It has been on the best seller list for programming books since it came out in March (usually in the top 5 of all programming titles), and has received glowing reviews (I posted a review of it on Amazon a few weeks ago and gave it 5 stars). If you are in the market for a good ASP.NET book, you might want to consider taking Amazon up on this offer before it closes (and apologies in advance if the price changes before you read this). Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you are looking for other good .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 books - I also recommend: C# 3.0 In a Nutshell , LINQ in Action , and Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (all of which average a 5 star rating on Amazon). | Go |
| April 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight ... Here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Displaying the Number of Active Users on an ASP.NET Site : Scott Mitchell continues his excellent series on ASP.NET's membership, roles, and profile support. In this article he discusses how to use ASP.NET's Membership features to estimate and display the number of active users currently visiting a site. ASP.NET Dynamic Data Update : The ASP.NET team last week released an update of the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature. This update adds several new features including cleaner URL support using the same URL routing feature that ASP.NET MVC uses, as well as better confirmation, foreign-key, and template support. ASP.NET Testing with Ivonna : Travis Illig blogs about a new testing framework named Ivonna that enables unit testing of ASP.NET web forms. ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET AJAX UI Templates : Nikhil Kothari from the ASP.NET team has a cool post that shows off a prototype he has been working on that enables clean client-side AJAX templating of UI. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit TabContainer Theme Gallery : Matt Berseth has another of his excellent posts - this one shows off a bunch of cool themes you can use to style the TabContainer control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Reducing Page Load Times with UpdatePanels and Timers : Paul Glavich posts of a cool trick you can use with tab controls to asynchronously load their content in the background in order to improve perceived page load time. Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? Dave Ward has a useful article that talks about the page methods feature in ASP.NET AJAX, and explains why they are static methods. JQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 : Brad Vincent posts about using the VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix we released in February to get a nice JavaScript intellisense experience in Visual Studio 2008 when using the JQuery AJAX library. ASP.NET MVC Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing : Fredrik Kalseth has a cool article that talks about the concepts behind inversion of control (IOC) and how you can use this with ASP.NET MVC to better isolate dependencies and enable better unit testing of your code. Stephen Walther's ASP.NET MVC Talk: Stephen Walther delivered a many-hour ASP.NET MVC post conference talk at ASP.NET Connections last week. You can download his slides + demos for free. Also check out his previous posts on Unit Tests with Visual Studio 2008 and TDD with Rhino Mocks . MVC Contrib Project Update : Eric Hexter blogs about some of the latest updates to the open source MvcContrib project to work with the latest ASP.NET MVC interim source release . Testing Action Results with ASP.NET MVC : Jeremy Skinner blogs about some cool extension method helpers he has added to MvcContrib to enable pretty sweet testing of Controller actions. MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 Release : Troy Goode has posted an update to his excellent MVC Membership Starter Kit. This version works with the interim ASP.NET MVC source release. Silverlight Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime : Scott Morrison from the Silverlight team has a cool blog post that talks about how to define Silverlight DataGrid Columns via code at runtime. Visit my Silverlight links page for more DataGrid posts. Silverlight HTTP Networking Stack (Part 1 ), (Part 2 ), (Part 3 ): Karen Corby from the Silverlight team has a great three part blog series that talks about the new Silverlight 2 networking stack and how cross domain security works with it. Pushing Data to a Silverlight Client with Sockets (Part 1) and (Part 2) : Dan Wahlin demonstrates how to implement a "GameStream" socket server and connect to it from a Silverlight client using Silverlight 2's built-in network sockets support. Silverlight - the Song : Spike Xavier and Dan Wa | Go |
| ASP.net.com Community Links |
| Building Custom Paging with LINQ, ListView, DataPager and ObjectDataSource ... Custom paging applied using LINQ and Extension Methods. The used with ObjectDataSource, ListView and DataPager. | Go |
| Building DAC with Execution Time in ASP.NET 3.5 and C# ... This tutorial will show you how to build your own Data Access Component and how to retrieve the time taken to execute. C# version. | Go |
| DataTable - Adding, Modifying, Deleting, Filtering, Sorting rows & Reading/Writing from/to Xml ... In this article, I am going to explain how to Add, Modify, Delete, Sort, Filter rows of the DataTable also writing data to xml as well as loading data from xml. Apart from this, I will also talk about writing/reading Schema of the DataTable. | Go |
| ASP.NET Client Side State Management - Query Strings ... The article discuss the query strings state management technique and how to use it. | Go |
| Using UpdatePanel Triggers in C# ... In this example, we will look at how we can specify different controls to refresh the whole page, and parts of the page. We will create two UpdatePanels and see how we can refresh each of them as well as refresh the whole page with the triggers. C# version. | Go |
| Creating a Dynamic Data Web site using Scaffolding ... This post explains how to create a basic Web Site that uses ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET Dynamic Data provides the Web application scaffolding that enables you to build rich data-driven Web applications.
scaffolding is mechanism that enhance the functionality of the existing ASP.NET Framework by adding the ability to dynamically display pages based on the data model of the database. | Go |
| ListView Control with DropDownExtender and Menu ... This article describes how to display the Context Menu on each row of the ListView Control using DropDownExtender and Menu control. | Go |
| Using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC ... The Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Framework has been getting talked about more and more lately. The power and flexibility of ASP.NET MVC allows for developers to use libraries other than those include in the box. The popular JavaScript framework, jQuery, is no exception. | Go |
| URL Rewriting in ASP.NET using URLRewriter.Net ... Learn to use search engine friendly URLs for your ASP.NET pages | Go |
| Using ASP.NET 3.5 History Control in ASP.NET 2.0 ... As ASP.NET 2.0 does not provide built in support for Back button functionality in AJAX Update Panel,
This post will show you how to use ASP.NET 3.5 Ajax ControlToolKit History control with ASP.NET 2.0, to achieve the back button functionality in ASP.NET 2.0 | Go |
| CodeProject.com ASP Links |
| Project Management Costing FAQ ... Project Management Costing FAQ | Go |
| Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 2 ... Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 2 | Go |
| Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 1 ... Crystal and Reporting Services FAQ Part 1 | Go |
| Project Management FAQ ... Project Management FAQ | Go |
| Selectable GridView with WaitBox ... This article describes how to implement a selectable GridView control in ASP.NET. | Go |
| Make more efficient access to XML data with XPathNavigator Object ... This article aims to demonstrate the usefulness of the XPathNavigator object to access the XML data, more quickly and efficiently. | Go |
| Javascript Progress Bar ... how to create a manual and automatic progress bar using JavaScript | Go |
| Vacation Request 2.0 - Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and DotNetNuke™ ... A DotNetNuke module communicating with a WF workflow hosted in the Open Source project IWebWF | Go |
| ASP.NET GridView Image Command Button Problem (Multiple PostBacks) ... This article describes workarounds to solve the problem of multiple postbacks when using a command button of type image in an ASP.NET GridView (Internet Explorer). | Go |
| Dynamic validation according to logged in user ... Dynamic validation according to logged in user | Go |
| An ASP.NET Data Layer base class for LINQ disconnected mode ... Quickly and easily implement your LINQ Data Layer with this abstract class. | Go |
| How to generate a WPF image and render it in a Webpage ... WPF Image generation | Go |
| Sortable GridView using jQuery's TableSorter ... A client side sortable grid view using jQuery's plugin Tablesorter | Go |
| 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks ... 16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation blocks | Go |
| DotNetSlackers.com Links |
| Flickr Xplorer - A Cool ASP.NET MVC Example ! ... Mehfuz Hossain has created a cool open source application based on ASP.NET MVC
The
CodePlex project can be found HERE !You can use the application LIVE
- HERE !... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Data Binding Data Conversion ... One of the more interesting topics that arise in Data-binding is that of Data Conversion. So much can be accomplished without explicit conversion that it is easy to overlook until you hit the real world. To see this, I'll make a small modification to the code I wrote for the Silverlight Tutorial on Data Binding. The premise of this simplified example is that you are interacting with a bookstore or a library, displaying information about one book at a time. We assume that you get the book... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Sitefinity reviewed for 2009 Web CMS Report ... Sitefinity was selected as 1 of only 42 Web Content Management Products to be reviewed for the 2009 Web CMS Report . This annual report provides a comprehensive overview of CMS products & best practices across 7 vendor categories and multiple platforms.
The CMS landscape contains hundreds of products; it is very exciting for Sitefinity to be selected as one of only a few to be reviewed
Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Selectable GridView with WaitBox ... This article describes how to implement a selectable GridViewControl in ASP.NET.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| VB Video Tutorials on ASP.Net Dynamic Data (Lisa Feigenbaum) ... Bill Burrows, VB MVP, has released some great videos on the ASP.Net Dynamic Data features that were added in VS2008 SP1. What is Dynamic Data?
"ASP.Net Dynamic Data provides a framework that enables you to quickly build a functional data-driven application, based on a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model. It also adds great flexibility and functionality to the DetailsView, FormView, GridView, and ListView controls in the form of smart validaton and the ability to easily change the display of... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET GridView Image Command Button Problem (multiple PostBacks) ... This article describes work arounds to solve the problem of multiple postbacks when using a command button of type image in an ASP.NET GridView (Internet Explorer).... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| An Introduction to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer ... Getting a new ASP.NET Web development machine up and running isn't hard, but there are a lot of steps involved and it takes a fair amount of time. That's why Microsoft is working on a new tool called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It provides a single interface for installation of the tools needed to start developing Web applications on the Microsoft platform.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| New Visualizations at Work: Moving to Silverlight Clients ... Microsoft's tools for building rich Internet applications (RIAs)-ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight 2-promise to help take the "developer ugly" out of line-of-business software.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Intersoft Updates WebUI Studio.NET Components ... Indonesian component maker Intersoft Solutions Corp. last month released a new version of its controls and components suite for ASP.NET -- and Silverlight-based Web development.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| PARTNER DEVELOPER DINNER: Introduction to ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) ... Microsoft Developer Dinner Series for Partners Presenting Introduction to ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) The "Same Event" on different days in DC and Virginia, pick one! Where Date/Time Registration Link Address DC Wed. October 15th (6:30-8:30PM) Register... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Gaining an Advantage with Application Roles ... Youve seen them, but have you really ever used them?... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Practical ASP.NET: Looking (Suspiciously) at SP1 ... What's in SP1 for ASP.NET developers? At least one bug fix, a couple of enhancements and -- perhaps -- something that will change your life. But Peter is suspicious.... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET MVP Award and MVC ... I still don't have a chance to blog about my personal achievement recently - I got my MVP status renewed on Oct 1! Yes, it's a great news for myself and I enjoyed it so much since 2001.
BTW, I'm very happy to meet few friends this week, including Greg Low and Phil Hacck. Greg is a SQL expert and I knew him for years in the space of INETA and online community personally. Phil is obviously a star and I really enjoy his presentation about introducing MVC at local TechEd today (even the session... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| Scott Guthrie will be on the PDC keynotes would he be at the PDC Underground? ... Gu will be at the PCD talking about Silverlight 2 and jQuery. Im guessing that a few news will come out on that presentation. Mr Guthrie likes to release the news. I would be missing the PDC this year. $2000 is an expense that I cant find a justification to give the wife. Im still trying to get a BluRay DVD player for the house. Yet for people like me that cannot make it to the PDC, there is a free event called The Underground PDC, I wonder if Scott Guthrie would be attending. You need to... Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here . | Go |
| ASP.NET.com Links |
| Data Controls 101 ... I’ve worked with asp.net a bit at school before I came to Microsoft. Being the “data dev” as you would imagine, I get lots of bugs that have to do with the data (datasource/databound) controls. I also scan the internal and external forums and try to help customers find solutions to their problems. This blog post is the first of a series on common scenarios using data controls, that I call Data Controls 101.
When new developers come to asp.net from other web technologies/backgrounds the tendency is to continue doing things as they did before, when in fact they should learn the paradigms we expect in asp.net webforms (mvc is kind of different).
These posts will be scenario driven with tidbits of information here and there. Let’s start with a simplest case:
I want to show a list of categories from my database.
Before you pick a control and rush to go write code, you should ask other questions that will help narrow the choices down. Do I want to delete, update, insert, select? Do I want to define my control template manually or use column auto generation? After you decide what set of functionality you want there is still probably a bunch combinations of controls you want choose to accomplish your goal.
Controls
Select
Delete
Inline Edit
Insert
Paging
Sorting
Column Autogeneration
GridView
x
x
x
-
x
x
x
ListView
x
x
x
x
x(DataPager)
x
-
Repeater
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
DetailsView
-
x
x
x
x
-
x
FormView
-
x
x
x
x
-
-
DataList
x
x
x
-
-
-
-
The above table is a summary of what those controls on the left support out of the box without much added effort (some other controls can do the same thing with a little more work).
Ok so we’ve decided to we want a tabular layout, paging, sorting and selection with inline editing. Looking at the table I’d pick the GridView or ListView.
Next goal is to choose the datasource control. The same kinds of questions apply when picking the datasource control, but it is more specific to how you want to access your data. In my case I’ll use LinqDataSource.
Finally the code: < asp : LinqDataSource ID ="categoriesSource" EnableUpdate ="true" runat ="server" ContextTypeName ="FowlerSample.NorthwindDataContext" TableName ="Categories">
</ asp : LinqDataSource >
< asp : GridView ID ="categories" runat ="server" AllowPaging ="True" AllowSorting ="True" DataKeyNames ="CategoryID" DataSourceID ="categoriesSource">
< Columns >
< asp : CommandField ShowSelectButton ="True" ShowEditButton ="true" />
</ Columns >
</ asp : GridView >
That’s all you have to write and suddenly things just work. Next time I'll go over some of how the “magic” works. | Go |
| Automocking container with Moq ... I realized that I never blogged about this cool feature contributed by Slava to Moq-Contrib . Auto-mocking containers was an idea originally (IIRC) from the guys at Eleutian , later on picked up by Jeremy Miller with Rhino Mocks and StructureMap . The wiki document Slava put together on Automocking is a fantastic overview. Basically, you can have an (Autofac -powered) container create your objects under test with all its dependencies injected as mocks:... Read full article | Go |
| Functional .NET - LINQ or Language Integrated Monads? ... As part of my talk at the Richmond Code Camp earlier in October, I had the opportunity to talk about how to implement functional aspects in C# 3.0. This talk revolved around such concepts as from mutable to immutable, from inheritance to functional composition, and the mind shift that is required. Part of this discussion involved very briefly a talk about monads. It's a very misunderstood part of computer science and one of the most powerful concepts to learn. Much like continuation passing style, this style is often maligned as a result. But, let's work to change that.
What Is a Monad?
Monads come to us originally from category theory. When monads applied to functional programming, they simply are a construction, given an underlying type system, embeds a corresponding monadic type system. Simply put, the values you have become amplified values that are to be interpreted by the matching monadic type.
The formulation of a monad comes in three parts:
A type construction that defines for every underlying type, how to obtain a corresponding monadic type. If the given type in F# is 'a, then the corresponding monadic type for an Identity monad would be I<'a>. I'll cover more of what that means below.
A unit function that maps the underlying type to a value in the corresponding monadic type. In F# parlance, this maps to a Return function.
A binding operation of polymorphic type, in F# parlance, (I<'a>) => ('a => I<'b>) => (I<'b>). This maps to a Bind function given your monad builder. If you look carefully at the signature of this, you might also note that the LINQ SelectMany follows this syntax. Gee, what could that mean? The bind operation follows four steps:
The monadic structure exposes the underlying value of type 'a.
The given function is applied to the underlying value to obtain values of type I<'b>
The monadic structure exposes the underlying value of type 'b.
The monadic structure is reassembled over the results, given a single value of type I<'b>
Simply put, a monad, unlike your normal function results, stores function results and side-effect representations. This allows side effects to be propagated through the return values of functions without breaking the pure functional model. This is what makes it so powerful that it is a way to manage side effects. Given a pure language such as Haskell, this is the way that any side effecting operation should be done. Granted, there are impure ways of doing IO, but let's not go there.
There are some good sources of information on what monads are, including some great stuff from Brian Beckman:
Channel9 - Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids and Mort
Channel9 - Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monads
Wes Dyer - Marvel of Monads
Some examples of monads that are used frequently are such things as the maybe monad, identity monad, IO, collections and so on. Let's move onto implementing some of these monads in .NET, whether it be F# or even C#.
Implementing in .NET
To implement the above mentioned monads, we'll take examples in both F# and C# to see that both can do the job. Although I'll admit my preference for F#, C# can monads quite nicely using LINQ syntax. But that sometimes means that the from and select keywords might be confusing. But what people might not realize is that you are not limited to IEnumerable<T> inside LINQ. Instead, you could have any backing type you want. For example, I could have the identity type, maybe type, async type and so on. We'll cover each one of those in detail in the following sections.
Anyhow, let's get started with the identity monad.
The Identity Monad
The easiest monad to understand is the identity monad. This attaches no information to the underlying value, and instead only returns and transforms it.
Implementing in F#
To implement in F#, we | Go |
| SequenceViz 0.11 :: Reflector Addin support ... Just uploaded the latest release of SequenceViz which now includes the Reflector plugin with the WPF renderer.
Download | Go |
| Rosario VS2010 ... Reveals extensive enhancements for simplified application
life-cycle management, provides sneak peek at all key focus areas for Visual
Studio 2010("Rosario") and the .NET Framework 4.0. Stay tuned to http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/
for all of the action Regards | Go |
| Tulsa TechFest 2008 Wrap-Up ... We at Engage spent the end of last week in Tulsa, presenting and participating in the 3rd annual Tulsa TechFest . My colleague Ian has written up a great review, with links to all of our presentations on his blog . I presented on Building a DotNetNuke Module , walking through the Visual Studio project template that we just released , demonstrating what DNN requires of and offers to developers of modules. We had a great time and really enjoyed the turnout for our sessions. We hope that those of you...(read more ) | Go |
| Silverlight 2 RTM ... Microsoft has announced that Silverlight 2 has RTM'ed today and will be available tomorrow (Oct 14th). Read about it here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx Listen to ScottGu's teleconference here: mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/presspass/2008/10-13SL2_RTW_TeleconferencePlayback.wma Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ Another interesting announcement is that Microsoft is funding an Eclipse project in order for Eclipse developers to be able to develop Silverlight applications. http://www.eclipse4sl.org/ | Go |
| Silverlight 2 RTW out tomorrow - October 14th! ... In my last points of interest post I mentioned that an announcement was going to be made today. I thought it would either be a release date announcement (if they were going to miss the PDC) or that Silverlight was actually released. Well it appears it is not out now but will be by the end of tomorrow.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks to Ken Cox for spotting this first.
Press Release available from here .
John | Go |
| Using jQuery to do Ajax Form posts in Asp.net MVC ... It is now official with Scott Guthrie 's post that jQuery will be bundled with Asp.net. jQuery is a tiny 15K JavaScript library that contains features from UI tweaks, DOM manipulation to full Ajax control. In my last post, I have shown how to get going with Ajax.Form using Microsoft MVC Ajax library. In this post, I will show how to do Ajax form posts with jQuery but in Ajax.Form style. To mark the marriage of jQuery, I have released a new version of FlickrXplorer that uses nothing but jQuery on the client. More info on the release can be found at the following URL. http://www.codeplex.com/FlickrXplorer/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18041 Ajax.Form gives a nice way of adding ajax features with no more tears. Just add a using block with necessary html controls and a submit button, everything else is taken care of on behalf. Being inspired by it, in FlickrXplorer project I have created a Html.JForm that works in a similar way using jQuery library. To see how it works, it is to mention that Ajax.Form basically creates a html form with onsubmit hook where it injects few JavaScript from Microsoft MVC Ajax Library. To replicate, le's say to do an image list paging with Html.JForm that gets the data, shows the loader and updates the container I first added the MVC JavaScript (Ex. Inside default.master) file with ajax stuffs that works with Html.JForm and referenced the jQuery library. < script type ="text/javascript" src ="<%= Page.ResolveClientUrl(" ~/Content /jquery-1 .2 .6 .min .js ") %>" ></ script >
<script src="<%= Page.ResolveClientUrl(" ~/Content/mvc-jquery.js") %>" type="text/javascript" ></ script >
Finally, In the actual ascx/aspx file, I wrote the following
<%
using (Html.JForm(VirtualPathUtility.AppendTrailingSlash(HttpContext.Current.Request.Path), "POST" , new JOptions
{
TargetPanelId = "imgListContainer" ,
WaitPanelId = "imgListWait"
}))
{ %>
...
...
<%
} %>
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
That's it , also it is to include that this will work with controller actions that return either ContentResult or ActionResult.
Basically, the signature of Html.JForm looks like
Overload 1 : Html.JForm(actionurl, methodType, JOptions);
Html.JForm("/controller/action" , "GET/POST" ,
new JOptions
{
TargetPanelId = "update containter"
WaitPanelId = "intermidiate visible panel"
});
Overload 2 : Html.JForm(actionurl, methodType, JOptions, htmlArrributes);
Html.JForm("/controller/action" , "GET/POST" ,
new JOptions
{
TargetPanelId = "update containter"
WaitPanelId = "intermidiate visible panel"
}, new { name = "myForm" );
Going deeper, these are actually HtmlHelper extenstion methods
public static IDisposable JForm(this HtmlHelper helper, string action, string method, JOptions options, object htmlAttribtues)
{
return new JQueryForm(helper, action, method, options, htmlAttribtues);
}
Behind the scene they call a IDisposable class callled JQueryForm that generates the form with actual hookup scripts. The concept is to generate the starting form tag with all the attributes provided during initialization and the ending form tag on dispose call. This basically is done in the Ajax.From that can be found with a littl | Go |
| Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14 ... Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight . Customers already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases...(read more ) | Go |
